A question I was asked the other day was whether I can have Virtual Vault in the Enterpris Vault Outlook world, without any archived content on the end-users workstation.

The answer is yes.. Nearly 🙂

Vault Cache consists of two components :

a/ A metadata cache

b/ Archived content (cache, I guess)

Whether the users desktop policy says to have content or not, you always have the metadata cache for each archive that you synchronise. This is seen on the client as one (or more) .MDC files.

You can’t get away from having that. If you delete it, next time Outlook starts you will get a new one (placing a burden on the Enterprise Vault server hosting your archive) and until that MDC is built on the client, the contents of Virtual Vault (even the hierarchy) will be incomplete.